My first "computer, while growing up, was a Russian clone of a ZX Spectrum. I got it as a "hand-me-down", along with a few tapes and a short booklet in cyrillic. Back then I had no clue of English and even less of other languages, so I just dumbly typed the programs in. I guess that first computer was responsible for me learning to program, since the games would not load from any of the tapes I had. This happened again with my second gifted computer, a Sinclair QL, for which I had no games. Anyway, more than 30 years later I thought of trying to see what was actually on those ZX tapes: There are 35 games listed, though I managed to load probably less than 10 in that computer's lifetime. Step 1 - buy a cassette deck and restore it But we're not here about that project. Instead, you should make sure that you have a decent and well-adjusted tape player. If it's a brand name and mains-powered, it should probably work. Portable players in my experience have a low
Electronics and programming interspersed at various levels of difficulty.